


Left to decay

by sapphicarchivist



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Fan Statement, Fear domain, Gen, Statement Fic (The Magnus Archives), The Corruption Fear Domain (The Magnus Archives), The Desolation Fear Domain (The Magnus Archives)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-18
Updated: 2021-03-18
Packaged: 2021-03-26 23:08:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30113472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sapphicarchivist/pseuds/sapphicarchivist
Summary: A random domain I wrote for english class( warning: there’s themes of death, epidemic, fungus/decay and illness as well as just some overall gross imagery (especially corruption themed)
Kudos: 2





	Left to decay

The forest has always scared her, even in the past when it’s only threat was the occasional off putting turn in a familiar path or a particularly dark shadow. They have spread now, crawling like lichen over the borders of the town. She had heard rumours of cutting it away from the village before the rot settled but it’s too late. There is something of it in the soil now, the way it’s always damp and spongy. 

As she walks toward it the beeches’ slender limbs, pale as a fish, lean in to one another. They knit and weave together like fractured bones in a wooden embrace; concealing the sky in a canopy of cobwebs and splinter. If she closes her eyes it could almost be a chapels arch.  
There were other trees too, ones she did not recognise intertwined with familiar oaks and fat elms that struggle cheek by jowl with the thin, grasping beeches. Enriched and swollen by the damp soil where the branches stretch and scratch. They had pulled their way through the once quiet earth with squat shrubs, their thick leaves a deep purple, glistening slightly like the sweat soaked skin of the people in the towns she passed. The ones who’s doors were rubbed raw with red paint and lingering blood, with air that smelled bitter. 

The air here is sticky and close, settling its miasma in her hair and skin. In this place there is no noise but the buzzing of flies. They hover in great swarms and every once in a while descend in a thick blanket; a buzzing, shifting shroud over what life had existed here, that had bled the soil rich and fertile for those greedy, bloated trees. 

Below the trees something else crawls and struggles. A fungus, reaching up over the trees and leaving trails of spongy grey green flesh over the roots and glazing the trunks with sticky tendrils.  
It does not tangle with the branches, simply steadily spreading over the roots and whatever had the poor sense to die here. 

Patches of this forest are burned to a skeleton, scoured clean by desperate purifying flame. She thinks the people did it, although the fires she has seen seem hungry and form odd shapes, leaving only the taste of ash and blackened bone. It doesn’t last long before the rot returns though and forms new flesh on the bones of charred trees 

Not even death is safe here from buzzing sickness and eager rot. Nothing is. But isn’t it nice? To be loved and needed by so many eager, hungry lives. Surely it is nothing less than cruel to keep her flesh for just one. She could be such a wonderful hive. Doesn’t she want to be loved by them? The forest does, to share with her. She isn’t sure when her thoughts start to sound like flies too. But what does it matter? The rot is too deep to burn away now. 


End file.
